On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 06:37:52 UTC, Tony wrote:
On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:12:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I don't know why you're so obsessed with storage when even
midrange smartphones come with 32 GBs nowadays, expandable to
much more with an SD card. My tablet has only 16 GBs of
storage, with only 10-12 actually accessible, but I've never
had a problem building codebases that take up GBs of space
with all the object files, alongside a 64 GB microSD card for
many, mostly HD TV shows and movies.
The smallest storage Windows 10/Linux laptops have is a 128GB
SSD. Even with a faster 128GB SSD being around the price of a
1TB hard drive, I still see 1TB being the dominant low-end
storage. So I am going by what I see being offered as a
minimum. It may be that most or even 99% of people can get by
with 32GB flash memory, but it isn't being offered (except on
Chromebooks which have traditionally only been web browsers,
and on Windows 10S machines which can only run Windows Store
apps).
The vast majority of users would be covered by 5-10 GBs of
available storage, which is why the lowest tier of even the
luxury iPhone was 16 GBs until last year. Every time I talk to
normal people, ie non-techies unlike us, and ask them how much
storage they have in their device, whether smartphone, tablet, or
laptop, they have no idea. If I look in the device, I inevitably
find they're only using something like 3-5 GBs max, out of the
20-100+ GBs they have available.
You only need 32 GBs or more if you're downloading a bunch of HD
videos like I do, playing giant AAA games, or setting up a bunch
of VMs, like some devs do. These are all niche uses, that 99% of
users don't partake in, which is why 32 GBs is plenty for them.
Are you suggesting they are developing their games for iOS
and Android devices ON those devices? Apple has XCode for
developing iOS apps and it runs on macOS machines only. There
is also the Xamarin IDE or IDE plug-in from Microsoft that
allows C# on iOS, but it runs on macOS or WIndows. For
Android, there is Android Studio - "The Official IDE of
Android" - which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is
no Android version.
Yes, of course they're still largely developing mobile games
on PCs, though I'm not sure why you think that matters. But
your original claim was that they're still using PC-focused
IDEs, as opposed to new mobile-focused IDEs like XCode or
Android Studio, which you now highlight.
I never made any previous claim about what IDEs are being used.
The only time I previously mentioned an IDE was with regard to
RemObjects and Embarcadero offering cross-compilation to
Android/iOS with their products.
"There is a case to be made for supporting Android/iOS
cross-compilation. But it doesn't have to come at the expense
of Windows 64-bit integration. Not sure they even involve the
same skillsets. Embarcadero and Remobjects both now support
Android/iOS development from their Windows (and macOS in the
case of Remobjects) IDEs."
That was to highlight that those two compiler companies have
seen fit to also cross-compile to mobile - they saw an
importance to mobile development. It wasn't about what IDEs are
best for mobile or even what IDEs are being used for mobile.
If you look back to the first mention of IDES, it was your
statement, "Good luck selling game developers on using D to
develop for Android, when you can't supply those same game
developers a top-notch development environment for the premier
platform for performance critical games - Windows 64-bit."
That at least implies that they're using the same IDE to target
both mobile and PC gaming, which is what I was disputing. If you
agree that they use completely different toolchains, then it is
irrelevant whether D supports Windows-focused IDEs, as it doesn't
affect mobile-focused devs.
Not that it matters, but I don't think that XCode meets the
definition of "new mobile-focused IDE" as-as far as I know, it
was developed for OS X development and is still used for such.
Android Studio may be "new mobile-focused", even though based
on IntelliJ IDEA.
Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile
development. XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty
much all that devs are using it for these days.
Yes, Windows is dominant, dominant in a niche, internal IT.
The consumer mobile market is much larger nowadays, and
Windows has almost no market share there.
Sad too, because of all the tablet/phone interfaces, the only
one that is not just "icons on a background", and my personal
preference, is Windows Mobile.
I've always thought that flat Metro interface was best suited for
mobile displays, the easiest to view, render, and touch. To some
extent, all the other mobile interfaces have copied it, with
their move to flat UIs over the years. However, it obviously
takes much more than a nice GUI to do well in mobile.
As for Microsoft, Windows is not their only product, they have
moved Office onto the dominant mobile platforms. As long as
they keep supporting mobile, they could eke out an existence.
Their big bet on Azure is going to end badly though.
They have Word, Excel, Powerpoint for mobile, but they are
free. The Android store mentions "in-app purchases" but I
wasn't offered any. Maybe it is for OneDrive storage of files.
I already have that so it could be why I don't see anything to
purchase in the app.
My understanding is that they're not full Office either, that
features are still missing that you can only get in the paid
desktop version. I don't know how much those missing features
matter, as I don't use Office or any such suite, but MS would be
making a mistake to not offer those on mobile eventually.
Why did they fund development of a new iMac Pro which is
coming this December as well as the new MacBook Pros that
came out this June? That's a contradiction of "milk it like
an iPod".
Because their userbase was rebelling? I take it you're not
that familiar with Mac users, but they were genuinely scared
that Apple was leaving them behind, since they weren't
refreshing Mac and Macbooks much anymore and all Apple's focus
is on iOS:
So, let them rebel. You said that they would like to see it go
away, and/or they want to milk it. If you have to spend money
on development to keep selling it, then you can't "milk it".
You and I and Jobs may've let them rebel, but Apple is a public
corporation. They can't just let easy money go, their
shareholders may not like it. Perhaps you're not too familiar
with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making good
money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple devs
off the real cash cow, iPhone. Even if the Mac financials aren't
_that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss off your
oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying iPhones and
iPads too.
So they have to constantly make a calculation, has the Mac
userbase shrunk enough yet that they can just ditch that legacy
desktop OS? Maybe they have a converged device in the works, ie
the iPhone XV will ship a macOS GUI/environment as an iOS
software upgrade to be used with their version of Dex/Sentio,
after which they can tell those users, "Just buy an iPhone and
get the Mac software upgrade." ;)
Either way, I'm sure they're crunching the numbers every quarter
on when to cut bait, but given they've kept the iPod Touch around
this long, I doubt the Mac will be axed anytime soon. They've
already heavily cut their Mac investment though, as all you hear
from Mac users is that the pace of feature development and bug
fixes has greatly slowed (this article also dings iOS, but notice
that most of the specific criticism is for OS X and its apps):
https://pljns.com/blog/2016/02/04/apples-declining-software-quality/
It is ironic that Microsoft and Ubuntu both saw a convergence
of mobile and desktop and began modifying their desktop
interace to best suit mobile, and now Ubuntu has abandoned the
idea and Microsoft has abandoned the phone market. As it turns
out, any convergence will have to come from the two dominant
mobile OSes as it is impossible to go the other direction due
to the app catch-22.
I think Jobs got it right that you cannot converge too early, ie
Apple kept their desktop and mobile OS's separate and are only
slowly converging them. One reason is that the mobile hardware
was just not powerful and efficient enough back when Windows 8
tried to converge the two UIs. Another is that the mobile market
is much more important and far larger, so its better to focus
more on getting that right, then just add a desktop GUI later as
a mobile feature.
Microsoft was really caught between a rock and a hard place, as
that desktop GUI for "lean forward" work is all they knew, what
the entire computing market and their dominant business was built
on. For MS to rush headlong into mobile-first and leave the
desktop behind would've taken a giant push, one that their
corporate culture, fat, flush, and arrogant after a decade of
minting money, was likely incapable of making.
Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even
Jobs by all indications. Mobile has really been a tidal wave
over the last decade. Funny how all you hear is bitching and
whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they missed
the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's nothing
fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the biggest boom
of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew right in front
of their faces. :D